(Though I’m proud to say there’s been a post for every week since I’ve begun this year’s project, as promised.)

This is not without good reason.

I’m trying to move, once more.

See, I moved from Philadelphia a few years ago to Oklahoma.

Now I’m moving within the state (for the second time).

I’ve become a bit of an itinerant, it appears.

Oddly enough, the old me – the one prior to disintegrating into cigarette ashes afloat upon a lake of whiskey – never moved.

Traveled, sure.

But never really moved… more than 10 miles from where I was born, to be clear.

I felt too tied to friends.

Too obligated to family.

Too beholden to jobs.

My mother and grandmother often dissuaded me from relocating.

My father didn’t take enough interest in me to counter them.

It was only after those two powerful, female influences in my life died – and my grief-stricken dad fled the state in the interim of their respective deaths – did the idea finally cross my mind in any meaningful sense.

Upon voicing the prospect to a close friend, he replied:

“Go.

No one needs you here.”

Hearing that made me sympathize with gunshot victims.

The words rang in my ears; their impact almost knocked me to the floor.

It took me a bit to recover, but I saw the Truth of his statement.

My friends were grown men and women with lives (and sometimes children) of their own.

My family was dead or had abandoned me.

My fiancé had betrayed me and gone.

My job had fired me.

I was completely unnecessary.

Without melodrama, I can say honestly:

I was a man without a people, a family and – in an almost literal fashion – without a country.

Although I saw the Truth in his words, I would misunderstand that particular Truth.

I interpreted the words as a rejection.

An abjuration of the ghost I’d become.

A banishing of the oft-summoned “Jersey Devil” (the nicknamed I’d acquired years prior).

Thus, I crawled into a row home in a Philadelphia ghetto to complete the suicide I’d begun.

However, I’d be fortunate enough to reinterpret that enervating statement a year or so later.

While talking with folks online (via my writing on this blog and another), I’d discover I still had things to offer the world.

That what my friend had meant (he’d later confirm this) was that the person that needed me most was myself.

That my time in the area was over but not the world.

That there were other rivers in need of fording; roads to travel; friends to meet; and enemies to harry.